Flexibility and Family

I don't want to be that guy who relates everything back to his book, but ... this passage from Russell Shorto's Times piece on fertility in Europe and elsewhere dovetails awfully well with what Reihan and I talk about in Grand New Party vis-a-vis work-life balance, and the sort of policies social conservatives should champion:

Last year the fertility rate in the United States hit 2.1, the highest it has been since the 1960s and higher than almost anywhere in the developed world. Factor in immigration and you have a nation that is far more than holding its own in terms of population. In 1984 the U.S. Census Bureau projected that in the year 2050 the U.S. population would be 309 million. In 2008 it’s already 304 million, and the new projection for 2050 is 420 million.

“Europeans say to me, How does the U.S. do it in this day and age?” says Carl Haub of the Population Reference Bureau in Washington. According to Haub and others, there is no single explanation for the relatively high U.S. fertility rate. The old conservative argument — that a traditional, working-husband-and-stay-at-home-wife family structure produces a healthy, growing population — doesn’t apply, either in the U.S. or anywhere else in the world today. Indeed, the societies most wedded to maintaining that traditional family structure seem to be those with the lowest birthrates. The antidote, in Western Europe, has been the welfare-state model, in which the state provides comprehensive support to couples that want to have children. But the U.S. runs counter to this. Some commentators explain its healthy birthrate in terms of the relatively conservative and religiously oriented nature of American society, which both encourages larger families. It’s also true that mores have evolved in the U.S. to the point where not only is it socially acceptable for fathers to be active participants in raising children, but it’s also often socially unacceptable for them to do otherwise.

But one other factor affecting the higher U.S. birthrate stands out in the minds of many observers. “There’s much less flexibility in the European system,” Haub says. “In Europe, both the society and the job market are more rigid.” There may be little state subsidy for child care in the U.S., and there is certainly nothing like the warm governmental nest that Norway feathers for fledgling families, but the American system seems to make up for it in other ways. As Hans-Peter Kohler of the University of Pennsylvania writes: “In general, women are deterred from having children when the economic cost — in the form of lower lifetime wages — is too high. Compared to other high-income countries, this cost is diminished by an American labor market that allows more flexible work hours and makes it easier to leave and then re-enter the labor force.” An American woman might choose to suspend her career for three or five years to raise a family, expecting to be able to resume working; that happens far less easily in Europe.

If I may wax chauvinistic for a moment, I think the American model is self-evidently better: As Reihan suggests, a more flexible approach to work and childrearing represents a place where feminism and social conservatism don't have to be at odds, and indeed can reinforce each other's insights. This means that to the extent that we should consider doing more, a la Europe, to ease the burdens on working parents, we should be forging pro-family policies that strengthen our existing flexibility - as opposed to expanding the more inflexible, Europe-style policies that effectively penalize women (or men) for taking time off when their children are young, rather than outsourcing their care to strangers and going back to work.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.